Name: Gold Thioglucose
Brand: Damien Hirst
Rating: 5 (236 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of Damien Hirst's Gold Thioglucose (signed) is estimated to be worth between £12,000 and £18,000. This screenprint has shown consistent value growth, with an auction history of eight total sales since its entry to the market in October 2011. Over the past five years, the hammer price has ranged from £18,000 in September 2020 to £18,849 in September 2020. The average annual growth rate of this work is 2%. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 45.

Meaning & Analysis

Gold Thioglucose is a screen print from 2009 by Damien Hirst produced in an edition of 45. Showing a large grid of coloured dots, evenly distributed across the print, this work is a print edition of one of Hirst’s famous Spots paintings. No coloured dot is the same in this rectangular composition and the systematic grid is set against a gold backdrop.

read more about Spots

Each with the same pictorial and optical efficiency it is almost impossible to decipher each of Hirst’s Spots paintings from one another. Gold Thioglucose, however, differs from many of the Spots paintings in its use of a gold backdrop. Despite their deceiving simplicity, these works are laborious and painstaking to produce. They are also deceptive in their joyous appearance, as Hirst has explained: “If you look closely at any one of these paintings, a strange thing happens: because of the lack of repeated colours there is no harmony…So in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease: the colours project so much joy it’s hard to feel it, but it’s there.”

Integral to the impact of the Spots paintings is their endlessness and infinite potential towards many various colour combinations. This print is almost mathematical in its formulaic composition that is repeated across all the Spot paintings, with grids of various sizes. In the 1980s, the Spots paintings marked a shift in Hirst’s artistic career, where he began to employ assistants to complete the painstaking and laborious task of producing these works. The apparent lack of human intervention in Gold Thioglucose further emphasises the mathematical precision that underlines their compositions.